Nadia Eghbal first came to my attention through her essay (published in May but which I probably didn't see until June)
I found it alarming, given as how there was already a long-running terminological quagmire around what distinctions, if any, were important between the term "free software" and "open source" (or, more fully, "open source software"). (As I should have guessed, I wasn't alone in this).
I found it odd that she had conflated the complexities of licensing, and peoples' frustrations in the face of them, with the choice of phrase, even though there is no explicit reference to licensing in either term. Nor is there any explicit reference to licensing in her suggested remedy, that we use the phrase "public software".
Even though reading this essay did not inspire confidence, I'd heard she was working on a larger project. Rather than fly off the handle, I decided to hang fire on expressing my misgivings about the analysis in that essay. I cooled my heels and set out to try to find out more about this larger project, where she was coming from, and what she hoped to accomplish.
I was glad I did, because by mid-July, she reached a major milestone in that project, with the publication of her Ford Foundation-funded report on sustainability for software infrastructure Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure
I've been thinking about this, off and on ever since and have taken a stab at some (as yet, unpublished) write-ups to organize and present my thoughts.
In parallel with that, I've further been building my capacity to write and publish through this blog more generally.
I've come to the decision that I want to work towards publishing smaller chunks of text, more frequently, so I'm just going to push this reference to Eghbal's work out now without a lot of commentary. I hope, then, to work out from it in a couple of different directions in subsequent posts.